TEST DRIVING CARS SHOULD BE FUN

CHRISTIAN SCHAEFER — FOUNDER

001 — A BETTER EXPERIENCE

With a highly competitive market and a growing number of challenger brands arriving in Australia, consumers face an overwhelming array of price points and features. Somewhere amidst it all, there is a car that is the closest fit for a buyer’s needs, tastes and price point.
But most people never find that car. There is an almost universal dislike of the car buying process and all that comes with it; the research, the sales pressure, the weekends lost to test drives. Just 17 out of 4002 car shoppers surveyed in a recent Autotrader survey said the current car buying process is their ideal experience–a satisfaction rate of less than 1%. Most buyers do a couple of test drives, settle for something ‘good enough’ and put it all behind them.

Our all-new approach will save time and money, with a stress-free and transparent process

Our marketplace allows buyers to swipe-and- drive from a short-list of appealing cars, which are delivered for a zero-pressure test drive that an last up to a week.

On the other side of the equation, TheCarTest enables car manufacturers to shift their brand and their products to the top of an in-market car buyer’s short list. By directly connecting brands to consumers, our highly scalable platform will gather valuable real-time data that will enable car manufacturers to hone their offerings directly in response to consumer feedback. This data is not available anywhere else today.

A BETTER EXPERIENCE TO BUY

002 — A NEW WAY TO BUY

With such a low satisfaction rate among buyers, this is an industry that is ripe for disruption. And demographic trends are exacerbating this situation. A 2014 study by Deloitte Review found Generation Y drivers value customer experience three times as much as vehicle design.

TheCarTest’s app asks users a few simple questions about their price range and the type of car they are after. They are then presented with a range of cars that they can swipe through in an interface that is similar in some ways to how Tinder works. When the buyer gets a good feeling about one in particular, she fills out some online car rental forms and then our concierge delivers it to her door.

Buyers can take it for a joyride, drive it to work, go shopping, pick up the kids from school, and see if it fits their lifestyle. If they’re not convinced they can try another. If they want to buy it, someone will contact them to make that happen. By allowing manufacturers to directly incentivise consumers, our cars come with exclusive preferential pricing which averages $3000 off retail price.

003 — WIN-WIN FOR MANUFACTURERS

We believe car manufacturers will pounce on this opportunity, particularly challenger brands. With the top ten brands controlling 80% of the market, TheCarTest encourages consumers to consider cars from brands they may not have previously considered, and spend enough time with the product to allow it to ‘sell itself’.

A 2016 study by Deloitte predicted the car buying experience could ultimately become an extended ‘test drive’ period where customers can gauge how the car improves their daily life. Retail interaction would be replaced with something closer to a service-provider relationship, akin to the way a hotel concierge interacts with guests. Manufacturers including Daimler, BMW and Audi are heading in this direction by becoming more significant players in car- and ridesharing.

EXPERIENCE FROM FIRST-HAND

We take a ‘bums-on- seats’ approach that allows consumers to experience cars first-hand in their own setting

004 — WIN-WIN FOR DEALERS

Dealers and manufacturers currently pay around $50 a lead to digital service providers and online aggregators like Carsales, CarAdvice, CarWow and Autotrader. It’s a huge market. Carsales alone turned over $382 million last financial year in Australia. Only 1 in 12 of these leads becomes a sale.

We believe our proposition is more compelling. One in every six of our test drives will lead to a sale. By kicking a portion of the car rental back to the manufacturer or dealer who owns the test cars, our business subsidises the cost of providing test vehicles and works out at roughly the same price per lead. The difference is that manufacturers are engaging with consumers on a much deeper level.

Connecting manufacturers with consumers does not mean the dealer is cut out of the loop. Once a sale has been confirmed, it is carried out by a local dealership that has been chosen based on the buyer’s postcode. We help dealers meet the number of unit sales required per month to get their volume bonus from the manufacturer. Keeping dealers on-side is important because we will rely on their test cars in our initial roll-out.